


I got bullets where my heart is supposed to be.

by reygrets



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Everything Hurts and I'm Dying, F/M, Frank is a mess but he's doing his best, Hurt/Comfort, Karen loves him as much as she hates him, Porn with Feelings, Vignette, and all the reasons it falls down, post season one, samples of the life they try to build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 10:00:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16015589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reygrets/pseuds/reygrets
Summary: “Alright,” Karen won’t push him -- she never does anymore. It’s hard enough with him skulking around, a dead man all over again. She wants to be his refuge, but Frank didn’t know how to come home from war.His gaze flits over her, it’s clear that he doesn’t really believe that she’s gonna let it go, “Just a bad dream. Nothin’ to do about it.”There is something to be done about it, Karen’s suggested therapy and Frank rebuked with: dead men don’t do much talking.She can’t really argue, there.Karen runs her tongue across her teeth, bitter coffee and a cold counter pressing against her bare skin are sobering in the worst way.a.k.a all the times they fought with love and every thing that tried to stop it.





	I got bullets where my heart is supposed to be.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redbelles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbelles/gifts).



**october 15th, 6:25 a.m.**

 

It’s a routine --- Frank can only operate semi-functionally within them --- he wakes up at an ungodly hour, Karen thinks that not even God’s awake just yet. The sun is rising, winking a brook of light through the gusset of five dollar curtains, and illuminating the fact that she desperately needs to dust this place. Karen can smell the coffee brewing, the sheets beside her have long gone cold, but her fingers flex over the shape he’d left, that she’s still curled like a phantom around. 

 

“You up?” Like he’s got superhuman senses.

 

Karen’s grumbles her reply into the crook of her arm, using his abandoned pillow to shield her eyes from the mottled dawn. “No, I’m having a good dream, one where you sleep in, like a normal person.” 

 

Frank’s gruff laughter rouses her from her near-sleep, she pushes a mop of hair from out of her eyes, and he’s standing there, looking like an Adonis in his sleep pants and a tank top that’s flecked in … 

 

“Flour? Were you -- baking?”

 

His lip twitches, that thing that’s caught between a smile and grimace, “Don’t know if it qualifies, but yeah. Coffee cake, my grandma’s recipe.” Karen knows it’s a lot for him to talk about his family, even in passing, so she basks in the weight of his trust.

 

He’s not keen on sticking around while she does, always moving, his fingers drum against his thigh, “Cream and sugar?” It’s how she takes it every morning, he’s trying to fill the idle silence because he doesn’t know what to do without the buzzing, the humming of a life spent on the run.

 

“Yep,” she’s officially awake now, trailing after Frank’s shadow as he steps back towards her small kitchen. Bare, aside from his shirt she’d shrugged on at the last minute, she shivers. It’s late Fall, but Winter beats its frozen fists against the window. The sun she’d been resenting is lost to billowing, grey clouds. 

 

“This’ll warm you up,” he hands her a cup of coffee, mouth-watering as it compounds with the scent of the caramel crumble that’s baking in the oven at her side. 

 

Karen has another idea as to how they can to keep warm, but Frank’s hard to read, even if she’s the only person who possibly could, and she doesn’t know what he’s thinking, dark eyes hard as the coffee steams between them.

 

“You okay?” She asks a loaded question. 

 

His upper lip curls but he nods. “Yeah, just okay.” 

 

It’s not much. 

 

It’s enough.

 

“Alright,” Karen won’t push him -- she never does anymore. It’s hard enough with him skulking around, a dead man all over again. She wants to be his refuge, but Frank didn’t know how to come home from war. 

 

His gaze flits over her, it’s clear that he doesn’t really believe that she’s gonna let it go, “Just a bad dream. Nothin’ to do about it.” 

 

There _ is  _ something to be done about it, Karen’s suggested therapy and Frank rebuked with: dead men don’t do much talking.

 

She can’t really argue, there. 

 

Karen runs her tongue across her teeth, bitter coffee and a cold counter pressing against her bare skin are sobering in the worst way.  

 

She doesn’t really get to be mad, she’s the one who offered him a place to stay, warm food (she can’t cook for shit) and a bed to lie in, that she just so happened to share. Karen knows that you don’t get to love a man like Frank Castle and behave like normal couples do.

 

They’re not really a couple though, because dead men can’t love back.

 

“You still on sabbatical?” The way he phrases it makes her snort, his mouth working over the word as if he’s some posh aristocrat and his accent turns it sour, but it’s nothing aside from sweet, to her.

 

Karen thumbs a bead of sweat from her mug, “The thought of being holed up in an office makes me want to be sick, so yes. I’m still on  _ sabbatical _ .” She rolls her eyes and just like that the tension between them slips between her ribs, tucked away for later, but forgotten now. 

 

“When’s this famous coffee cake of yours going to be ready?” She points her toes to the oven that pops every so often in protest of actually being used, and her brow inches towards her hairline as if she really just can’t believe he’d baked it.

 

She can spy the recipe, caked in .. something .. where it’s tacked to her fridge by a Don Antonio pizza shaped magnet and flanked by a half dozen other take-out places emblazoned with well-used phone numbers. Karen doesn’t have the time or the patience to cook. 

 

Frank thumbs a bit of flour from his forearm, corded muscles twisting as he reaches for the egg timer Karen didn’t even know she had. “Bout --- twenty minutes? Give or take.” 

 

Now she’s smiling, trying to hide it against the lip of her cup but Frank’s got sharp eyes, and they never miss a thing. 

 

“Why? You got someplace to be, Ms. Page?” He steps forward and just then Karen’s aware that most of his bulk is taking up her kitchen. She dry swallows,  his gaze falling from her lips, to her jaw, to her throat before snapping back up to hers with an edge that says he’d kill a thousand men if they stood between where he does, and the chipped ceramic at her back. 

 

She takes another sip of her coffee, trying (and failing) to appear nonplussed, “Well, I am on sabbatical,” Karen parrots his New Yorker, but her voice wavers at the end. It’s hard to focus on breathing, with Frank Castle stepping up to her with intention written baldly in his dark expression, so Karen really can’t be expected to pull off a convincing accent just then. 

 

“I asked you a question,” rough around the edges but at his core, he’s still her Frank. “You got... Someplace. To. Be?” 

 

Karen’s throat bobs, “Wherever you are,” without thought, and the next thing she’s capable of feeling are the rough grit of his calloused fingertips and palm as they slide up her thighs and hoist her onto the countertop behind her. Pans thick with the remnants of batter clang to the wayside, some onto the floor, others into the sink. 

 

She can’t hear them because her heart is beating a desperate tattoo against the back of her ribs. 

 

Sometime between the kiss to her jaw (he smells like coffee, cordite, adrenaline and the echo of her perfume from last night), and the one to her collarbone, Karen’s heart had stopped dolling out a steady thump, thump, thump, and started screaming:  _ stay _ . 

 

He can’t, this impermanent fixture that she’d given a lifelong home in the house of her mind, Karen knows she can’t hope to tame him but she prays, nonetheless, that this time just maybe he won’t go.

 

Won’t let her bed grow cold.

 

“Frank,” she gasps out, he’s pulling her shirt apart and the buttons snap off, pinging every which-way, but it’s his, after all, and his hands are warm where they frame her ribs, once more leaving her without the ability to care.

 

“Yeah?” He grumbles, teething his way back up to her lips. He does pause, those baleful brown eyes of his turned up so she’d know that he’s still in this moment, not lost to the long, hard weight of him that’s currently trapped between her thighs.

 

When had they snaked around his waist? She doesn’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. 

 

She shakes her head, hair falling out of the messy bun she’d tried to trap it in, slipping over her shoulder as Frank moves to bare it. His fingers are deceptively nimble, and his mouth is soft as he greets every inch of skin that’s revealed to him by his tender ministrations. 

 

_ I’m here _ , he breathes as her milky skin turns pink, _ I’m not going anywhere _ .

 

And just then Karen’s heart cries out:  _ don’t make promises that you can’t keep. _

 

But he’s wrapping his lips around her right nipple, pebbling against his warm, flat tongue and it’s half the shock of his heat and the cold of the world around her, and half the want for pretending this is her always. Waking up to coffee, and Frank. 

 

He’s bowing the bulk of his body over her, this feral man of hers, and she sort of misses when his hair had been long -- something to hold on to. Her blunt nails grate against the buzz at the back of his neck, grappling with the musculature as he finishes bruising her chest. 

 

Frank’s always liked it just this side of painful, and Karen has discovered that whatever it is that he does, is exactly what she wants. 

 

She moans freely, loudly, her chapped lips hung open around a sound she’s pretty sure no human being is explicitly capable of making, but Frank’s playing out of her like some broken instrument on the back of his unholy love. 

 

He’s emboldened by every single concession Karen makes (everything she gives him, because her breathing all rough around his name? That too, is a gift). But her legs are flexing behind him, some unwavering strength that begs him to stay as much as it speaks to a knowledge that he can’t.

 

That one of these days she’ll be as empty as she was before he came into her life.

 

Maybe it’s better that he leaves because there’s no more pain, ripping off the band-aid. Karen’t braced for the inevitable but every single minute he’s here? Makes her forget there was a time he wasn’t, and that there’ll come a time he’s not. 

 

Frank pulls away, leaving her chest a mottle network of hickies -- some pink, some purple, some yellowing like an unset dawn but they’re hers to enjoy, hers to remember. 

 

She hates that the kiss he places to her forehead tastes an awful lot like goodbye. 

 

Karen tangles her fingers with the thin black straps of his undershirt and gives it a firm tug -- communicating now where words would fail, her tongue’s all tied up with the effort it takes to stop herself from saying:  _ please _ . 

 

_ I can’t lose you like I lost them. _

 

Every word of his tragedy beats a bloody rhythm through how he interacts with pleasure, with joy. 

 

Frank ticks his tongue against the roof of his mouth and reaches up to grab his shirt by the threadbare collar, pulling it off over his head. 

 

“God,” she marvels, an unintentional confession to match the way she’s been staring for the better part of … well .. forever? Since the day she’d met him? Only now there’s less guilt in her longing, more.. resignation. She’s not particularly proud of that fact, but it’s a truth she nonetheless wields, now that she’s caught in the act.

 

He quirks a grin, smug and sad and everything he’s ever felt compounded into what he knows best.

 

Her.

 

His fingertips are sandpaper rough so he’s careful, inching himself between her thighs so that he can lazily stroke the thatch of strawberry blonde hair he knows he’d find at their apex. He swallows, like they haven’t done this before, his dark eyes fall so that he can know he’s doing right by her.

 

“Please,” Karen catches herself pleading but he’s slow, still, carding through the pink, wet skin of her sex from so he can find where she’s the most sensitive. It’s just below her clit, the hood flexing over the tip of his thumb as he gives it a rough press, nerves hard under her satin lips. 

 

Frank murmurs a litany of praise when his head bows forward, brow held up by the elegant shape of her collarbone. From here he can hear how hard her heart beats, can feel where her lungs stutter, and when she stops. It’s navigational system for the hand that cups her sex, the heel of it grinding hard against her clitoris while one thick finger traces the seam of her opening. He wants to make her wait for it, but he can hear the rhythmic ticking of the timer in the background and the window for this is narrowing. So, as her hips rock into his palm, Frank obliges as quickly as he can. 

 

He needs to know he can do something with his hands other than harm, or hurt. 

 

She’s tight, hot, it’s a vice around one finger, and then two. Frank grunts into the next kiss he presses to her pulse, quick, like a hummingbird in the pale hollow of her throat.

 

“Yeah?” His voice a low, gravelly rumble but it’s encouraging -- he likes to watch her come apart at the seams, likes to see her without tension lining the stretch of her arms. Karen’s the only person he’s ever known who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders while simultaneously deserving to be carried on someone else’s. 

 

She should be loved and cared for. She should be safe. 

 

The only reason she’s ever been anything less is because of him. 

 

_ I owe you this _ , he thinks, curling those two fingers turned three, coaxing her open so he can truly explore her mind-whiting heat. 

 

Karen’s beyond words, the pad of his index and forefinger rutting against the nest of nerves just beyond the reach of her own hand, and his callouses still grate against her clit every time he thrusts his wrist up against her. She’s rutting haphazardly, the cold of the countertop long lost to the sting of wet-warmth blooming, hot in her belly and twisting tighter and tighter - like he’s got a drawstring down the length of her spine but it’s ringing her body into a self-circulating live wire.

 

Just this side of that sweet little death, just this side of feeling alive.

 

Her heart is beating so loud she thinks it might break something, is it trying to escape? To run away from this hell she’s trapped it in? She can’t care beyond the pleasure that’s rattling through her like a distant thunder, breaking hard and fast and when she finally, finally reaches that peak her eyes roll back and she’s feeling the edges of her nervous system blur where her skin pricks and reddens. Karen’s pale skin is blotted in pink and she sort of wants to yell at him for making her cum on her kitchen counter. Instead, she presses a kiss to the seam of his lips and waits for him to do something other than rub little circles in the wetness accrued on her thigh.

 

“Don’t keep me waiting, Castle.” She sounds mad at him, and she just might be. Mad for the featherweight kisses, mad for the nights without, mad for letting her think for one miserable moment that he was really dead, and mad that -- even with him alive, there’s an inescapable loneliness in loving him. He smiles crookedly, breath uneven, but nods a small nod to let her know he’s listening. He hears.

 

Frank ducks his head to catch her lips, more frantic than his kisses had been before, and it steals a whimper from her lungs. She’s not weak by any stretch of the imagination but being held like this, cherished  _ not  _ coddled, Karen doesn’t have to keep up the exhaustive undertaking of always being strong. 

 

“Yes ma’am,” he replies belatedly, but with the heat of his unyielding self-restraint. He’d stopped himself from pushing, from taking (from breaking) because he wants Karen to know she’s safe with him, no matter what. And he’s so close to abandoning caution in favor for indulgence, in fucking her until the cheap Formica underneath her, breaks. Because that’s what he  _ does _ , he’s Frank, the Punisher, his softness died with Maria. 

 

But he’s chiseled out a place in his heart and maybe, just maybe, he can share it with her. She was his ‘ever after’, after all. 

 

Karen’s bare, trembling as he takes a step back -- she’s not without the heat of his frame, for long. Just as long as it takes for him to kick off the cotton sleep pants that’d been sagging low against his hips, the full expanse of his power, his sins, laid out before her. It’s not the first time she’d seen him, and she prays it won’t be the last. 

 

Frank twitches. 

 

She notices, felt the hard plane of muscle between her thighs when they’d resumed their position, casually slung around him. 

 

The heavy, full weight of his cock startles her from this revelry and wrings out a full-bodied shiver from each and every point of contact they share. Dark, wiry hair slots against the flushed skin of her sex -- and Karen tries to refrain from mindlessly grinding her hips into his, pretending that she's capable of patience at all, anymore. He'd burned it out of her, and she won't be sorry for how she chooses to douse the flames.

 

He anchors himself, one hand wrapping around the back of her neck while its twin gives his shaft a few pumps - he’s plenty hard, but he’s got her slick all over his fingers and wants to take advantage of that, anything to ease the strain of her cunt as it struggles to take him in. Granted, this isn’t a position that really helps their cause; if anything the angle elevates her hips, protracted to flex down over him. 

 

Frank looks her in the eye when the head of his cock presses past the wet barrier of her labial folds, rests his forehead against hers but his gaze is unwavering. There’s something primal to it, unhinged, and Karen feels a fresh surge of wet heat pooling lower and lower until her sex is flexing uselessly around nothing.  _ C’mon _ , she thinks, chewing on her lip and meeting his eyes with hers (she’s sure he can smell the desperation on her, needy in a way that only Frank can make her feel), just another inch and there’s something in place of nothing. 

 

But he doesn’t stop, Frank presses forward and in one, smooth, sharp snap of his hips, he’s buried into the hilt.  

 

They both take a moment to gather themselves, Karen, because the stretch is something she’ll  _ never  _ get used to, and Frank because, well, it feels a little bit like he’s coming home. 

 

Her chin hooks over his shoulder, gaze skating around the narrow kitchen that’s somehow transitioned into the best imaginable place to be doing this. She spies the remnants of his baking, the timer that looks like its ticking awful low, the blister pack of her birth control nestled between the coffee maker and her notepad -- that way she’s biologically required to remember it in between her caffeine consumption, and itchy journalist hands. 

 

Karen sees the outline of his body where it’s reflected in the glossy veneer of her aged, off-white refrigerator, and tries not to be entranced by the sinew of muscles bulging as he sets a steadily growing cadence of thrusts that make it hard to  _ breathe _ . It’s a good thing that he’s kissing her, then, opening up her throat around those belly-deep moans. 

 

Her nails drag down his back, earning her a few growls of her own from Frank, which are wildly motivating and absurdly hot. But he’s fucking her hard enough now that her teeth rattle and her brain is no longer capable of doing anything but... Feeling. Reacting. _Being_. 

 

The lewd slap of skin dripping from her arousal and the healthy dose of his precum that combines into a thick pool between them is punctuated every so often by his knees hitting the cabinets and his bullish snorting that heats the side of her neck. There’s a cold sting that she can’t quite place until she hears the faint rattle of his dog tags, where they leave an inverted imprint of his name.

 

It’s the symphony of their bodies, the only song either of them had known before was doubt and pain and heartbreak on an endless cycle.

 

He’s close, she can tell because he’s digging bruises into the curve of her hips, thumb dented against the bones, he’s gone stiff as steel where he’s buried inside her, and wherever they continue to touch.

 

Frank’s chanting her name into her skin, burning like fire but it sinks heavily in her belly, a stone she swallowed the moment Karen accepted this was the man she was to love. It’s white-hot bliss building for a second, explosive bought-- it’s never enough that she cums once, Frank would push himself until she couldn’t feel anything that wasn’t the dull twitch of her overspent cunt.

 

Her own heart is racing, a deafening drone of blood rushing past her ears and it’s gotta be some sort of cosmic irony that right as Frank’s stuttering thrusts stop altogether, and a wet, viscous heat fills her, the timer for their breakfast is ringing its tune. Karen bursts into inelegant, hoarse laughter and The Punisher himself is smiling into her sweat-slicked shoulder. 

 

They eat in companionable silence, Karen perched on Frank’s thigh --- he’d cleaned between her own with a wet dishcloth as he kissed her gently on the cheek, whispering promises that  _ he’s got her _ . Fork fulls of coffee cake are speared past her lips, Karen’s perfectly capable of feeding herself, but Frank’s got a care-taking streak that she knows better than to question.

 

It’s soft, and Karen thinks she should text Matt, telling him she’d found heaven. 

  
  


**november 21st, 3:47 a.m.**

 

She didn’t tell Matt, in fact, she hasn’t spoken to him since he’d’ called her in the middle of what he called the ‘Frank crisis’ in Brooklyn. Karen shrugged him off, and she could tell in the distorted silence that it stung. 

 

He’s still staying with her, but they’re at a rundown, dim motel. Frank insisted someone had been tailing her one night, perched on her fire-escape like a fucking gargoyle. Karen doubts that, but she humors him. The Motel isn’t so bad, some ‘hipster’ chic that Frank protests on principle but when he sees the barred windows, the doorman that checks everyone’s cards .. he grunts, and so they check in under pseudonyms. 

 

Frank sleeps with a Beretta M9 pistol under his pillow, his fingers wrapped around the custom, textured grip while his other arm is draped over Karen’s waist. Keeping her safe, keeping her close. 

 

Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all, but  _ this  _ time he’s woken by a neighbor slamming their door. He jerks upright, wet with a cold sweat blooming across his brow.

 

Frank swallows but his throat is dry, he didn’t realize he was pointing the gun at the empty hallway until Karen’s hand is slipping over his own, trying to gently urge it back down, her eyes blown wide enough that he can see the frightened whites in the dark. 

 

“You’re okay,” Karen reminds him, but he’s barely able to hear her over the  _ boom, boom, boom _ of his heart -- in that moment a memory breaks through like a radio station he’d accidentally tuned into. Rawlins’ voice a mocking, sycophantic scar against the back of his mind and Frank is breathing hard enough that spittle gathers in the corner of his lips, tongue darting out to wet them. 

 

_ You’re okay. _ But is he? Can he ever hope to be? He’s still a broken man and Karen’s worked harder than he deserves, to heal him. She’s kind, she’s patient, she’s understanding but she’s sleeping in a seedy motel, woken by a pistol cocking in the dark because of him. Her life has been left in ruin, because of him.

 

He nods, relaxing as he comes back to himself and the dim room around them no longer resembles the hideout he’d lived in for months, strapped to a chair with adrenaline forced into his veins artificially. 

 

Frank doesn’t sleep that night, he stares at the ceiling until he wakes with the mocking yellow of an Autumn day screaming that it’s Thanksgiving.  _ One more time _ , he thinks, sitting at the edge of the bed, one more time and I’ve got something to be thankful for. 

 

He misses Maria humming while she cooked, sweeping the hair away from the back of her neck and earning reprimands when he kissed the clasp of her necklace. He misses Lisa and Frank Jr. driving them both crazy because it was too cold out for them to play. There’s something comfortable about the irritating moments of life, you don’t realize that you’d kill to feel annoyed at something small until everything, all of it, is taken.

 

Karen’s been awake for however long, and her fingertips measure the notches in his spine until her lips move to replace them, “Hey,” her voice is weighted with sleep, and Frank smiles a sad smile because, well, that’s what he has to give.

 

“You wanna order Chinese and watch a movie later?” Because it’s a holiday, why not live a little? 

 

She chuckles humorlessly, “And they say romance is dead.” But she’s happy, she’s happy that they have a chance to be unhappy, a chance to gripe and bitch and moan. That’s more than she thought they’d ever been able to share. So she’ll indulge in the mundane, the lackluster, the boring and the trite -- so long as it means Frank is there.

 

**december 7th, 7:07 a.m**

 

It’s different this time when she wakes up.

 

It’s a routine. he wakes up at an ungodly hour, Karen thinks that not even God’s awake just yet. The sun is rising, winking a brook of light through the gusset of five dollar curtains, and illuminating the fact that she still needs to dust this place. 

 

Only something’s wrong.

 

Karen can’t smell the coffee brewing, the sheets beside her have long gone cold, but her fingers flex over the taut, crisp sheets. As if she’d slept alone.

 

She’s shifting in a bed that suddenly feels too large, but there’s another thing out of place, it takes her sleep addled brain a handful of minutes to parse through the things it’s currently trying to wrap itself around. 

 

Two things she’s certain of; with the way her sheets are arranged, Frank had taken the time to tuck her in, but he had not stayed. He’d left for one reason or another and it isn’t until she reaches up to press her palm against her chest -- a damned effort to slow her broken heart -- she feels that familiar sting of metal that’s cold from winter burning its way through her walls.

 

Karen looks down, blinking the tears from her eyes so she can see the peat stamped with his name, with Frank Castle, with the number of his unit and well … she’s not military, she doesn’t know what it means, what any of it means.

 

Except that he’s left. 

 

Except that he’s left and this time.  _ This time _ , he’s not coming back.

 

She’d been mad at him for almost dying, mad at him for the lives he’s taken, mad at him for making her fall in love with a man she’s morally obligated to hate. Karen’s mad at Frank Castle because he’d taken her heart wherever he had gone.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my FIRST KASTLE FIC but I have loved these disaster children for quite some time. Let me know what you think, if you want a continuation/more fic. Thoughts and feelings and SCREAMING at me are all welcomed, as well as encouraged. Thank you all so much for reading. [Find my kastle/ marvel tumblr here.](https://two-batch.tumblr.com/)
> 
> a HUGE shoutout to meg, mina, mads, alex and tay who had to deal with me screaming endlessly about this fic and all of my sad feelings about frank. I couldn't have finished this without each one of you spectacular ladies. but a special shoutout to meg, without whom I :/ wouldn't have fallen back into my Kastle phase. I owe you my life and I'll never forgive you :/


End file.
